Redykołka

Appearance & taste

Redykołka is a small cheese in the shape of an animal, a bird, a heart or a spindle. The smallest, spindle-shaped cheeses weigh 30 to 60 g, all other shapes at most 300 g. Traditionally the figures are always made, sold and given as gifts in pairs.

The rind is smooth and elastic, bright straw-yellow to light brown with a delicate sheen that develops during smoking; it may be slightly two-coloured or almost white, slightly rough, with small unevenness and cracks that do not reach into the paste. The paste is elastic and semi-hard, homogeneous and firm, slightly salty and has a pronounced smoky flavour. The cheese contains at most 44 % water and at least 38 % fat in dry matter; the exact composition depends on the smoking time and the season.

Production

The milk comes from the Polish Mountain Sheep (“Polska Owca Górska”); up to 40 % milk from Polish Red cows (“Polska Krowa Czerwona”) from the area is permitted. It is not pasteurised. The cheese is made only during the grazing season, when the animals eat exclusively the plants of the meadows, mountain pastures and pastures of the area, such as alpine rock-cress, mountain ragwort, Carpathian snowbell, mountain saxifrage, alpine poppy and narcissus anemone.

All steps take place in the shepherds’ huts on the mountain slopes, and according to the specification the quality depends on the traditional skill of the head shepherds, the “Baca”. The milk first sours at ambient temperature, then soured milk is mixed with fresh milk in a copper kettle (“kotlik” or “kotlicko”). It is coagulated with rennet in a barrel (“puciera”), the curd is broken up with a wooden beating tool, the “ferula”, and up to half of the whey is drawn off. The curd is pressed together, taken out, crushed again by hand, shaped into a ball and placed in whey. The mass is then pressed into small moulds, placed in brine for up to 24 hours and dried for 12 to 24 hours. Finally the cheese is cold-smoked for 3 to 7 days on small wooden racks (“komorniki”) above or beside the hearth in the roof space of the shepherd’s hut.

Origin & history

The area covers the historical and ethnographic region of Podhale on the northern edge of the Tatra Mountains, with Nowy Targ and Tatra counties, and municipalities in the counties of Cieszyn, Żywiec, Sucha Beskidzka, Limanowa and Nowy Sącz. It lies between the Gorce, Tatra, Babia Góra and Magura National Parks, with the Pieniny National Park at its centre. A short growing season, low temperatures, strong sunshine, foehn wind, thick snow cover and soils on limestone and granite shape the plant life. The Polish Mountain Sheep is an improved form of the Zackel sheep of the Eastern Carpathians and the Balkans; according to the specification, the Polish Red is the oldest Polish cattle breed.

The cheese was brought to the region by Wallachian shepherds, together with their pastoral farming and the running of the shepherds’ huts (“bacówka”). Cheesemaking is first mentioned in 1416, when the village of Ochotnica in the Gorce was founded. The name comes from “redyk”, the ceremonial driving of the sheep up to and down from the pastures: when they were driven down, the cheese was given away, mostly to children, and in general any gift of cheese as thanks or as a token of favour was given this name. Wedding branches and harvest wreaths were decorated with small cheese doves and cockerels. An instruction issued by the Ślemień estate in 1748 describes cheesemaking in the shepherds’ huts in detail. In 1858 the travel writer Maria Steczkowska described how small animals and hearts were shaped from the leftover cheese that was no longer enough for an Oscypek.